Educational Researcher

The author discusses the challenges of educating teachers to engage, rather than deny or repress, differences that emerge at the dynamic, context-specific intersections of race, culture, gender, and sexuality. Although multicultural education discourse is well established, stereotypic representations and repressive silences persist in the sphere of practice. Interweaving postcolonial and feminist theories with reflections emerging from her multicultural teacher education practice, the author highlights tensions of doing multicultural work. She discusses how silencing forces operate even in seemingly “open” micro and macro contexts. To illustrate these arguments, the author engages two areas that have received limited attention in multicultural discourse itself: representations of Asian Americans and differences of sexuality. She recommends that the multicultural teacher education classroom serve as a site for modeling critical, self-reflexive engagement with difference and democratic participation, even as she acknowledges the limits of individual efforts in the process of educational and social change.

In this article, the authors argue for the use of ecological models of development in studies of teachers prepared through alternative certification (AC) programs. Previous studies of candidates in AC programs have focused on variables that describe their demographic characteristics. An ecological approach focuses on persons and situates their desires and attitudes toward teaching as shaped by their particular life circumstances and personal histories. This approach was applied to a large-scale study of individuals enrolled in California’s teacher internship program. The results are the development of six typological profiles that capture some of the complexities behind why individuals choose to enter teaching through AC routes.

Institutional analyses of public education have increased in number in recent years. However, studies in education drawing on institutional analyses have not fully incorporated recent contributions from institutional theory, particularly relative to other domains such as law and health policy. The author sketches a framework that integrates recent institutional theorizing to guide scholarship on these and other issues in K–12 public education in the United States. The author argues that although concepts such as “loose coupling” have been widely used, education researchers have not fully tapped institutional theories that have emerged more recently. The author introduces three interrelated constructs and applies them to a case study of district reading and mathematics reform. In the final section, the author considers how current developments in the governance of public schooling increase the utility of institutional perspectives and identify critical issues that need to be addressed in future work.

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative was undertaken to make education, training, and lifelong learning accessible at any time, anywhere. It has developed specifications and techniques that are being adopted globally by governments, businesses, and schools. Although ADL currently focuses on government and business applications, it has significant implications for the classroom structures, processes, and activities of K–16 education. The authors describe the ADL initiative and its implications for K–16 education and call for increased attention from educators and education researchers to the opportunities and challenges represented by anytime, anywhere, distributed learning.